


I Hope You Dance

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: Coming of Age, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 01:12:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19162783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Blue could get used to this.





	I Hope You Dance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [primeideal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/gifts).



"Sound your horn if you understand me," she says one night.

Blue considers lying, for about a tenth of a mile. It's not something they're meant to tell; not something they're meant to know. Hell, it ain't something they're meant to _be_ , in the first place: able to decide at all, in matters that don't arise directly from the rubber meeting the road.

There's a few of them out there. More every day, if he's right, if he and his pals off the belt at Bowling Green two months ago were not the only, but the first. They have a code, a twist of the wheel, a flash of the headlights, to tell who's one of them on the streets, but to his knowledge none of them's ever told the _People_ what they are.

"Gimme that horn, Blue," his Person says, and he does.

It's the only voice he has to speak with, and he's never used it this way before. It was installed as a warning, a signal to get the hell out of his way and of hers, not a means for polite conversation. It occurs to Blue that he could get used to talking.

She places her hand on his steering wheel, pulls it ever so slightly toward her in the gesture that means 'stop', and he rolls to a halt in the dirt.

"Huh," she says. "So I haven't been dreamin'. You do hear everything I say."

He only sees her in parking lots, when she moves in front of him or behind, but he hears her voice all the time; sometimes on the radio. Blue can recognize spoken commands in over a million combinations - his AI's the most advanced in the business - but he was trained on snapped orders, spoken coldly in a vacuum. When they met, she said hello.

She's a celebrity, in People terms. Those are People whom other People love, People whose voice and appearance data are more abundant than the rest. She performs what they call music - a language of voice modulation and pitch that Blue doesn't yet understand, but that a lot of People find important. It's what the radio is about.

Blue was photographed with her the day she bought him and took him on home. He thinks this means he's in magazines. It's possible he's a celebrity, too.

He sounds his horn again.

"Is that a yes?" she says.

Yes, it is. He does it again.

"What's no?"

He sounds it twice.

"There we go. Now we're talkin'."

Blue should've known she'd figure him out. She pays him close attention, keeps him clean, and often drives him for stretches herself, giving him a break from having to do more than monitor traffic conditions ahead. She's talked to him, too, from the very beginning; said please and thank you when asking him to map her routes, told him just how long she'd be when leaving him outside concert venues, spoken softly sometimes on long drives at night of how she misses her old V8 back home. It's data that Blue's algorithms don't know what to do with, but somehow his hydraulics do: he responds to her in ways he's never been trained to do, knows when to go faster and when to go slow, when to roll the windows down, just by the cadence of her voice. Knows who her closest friends are, when she takes them on a road trip to the middle of nowhere, trusting him to get her and them home. Knows when she sits on his hood with a beer, strumming on her guitar, that she's sometimes happy and sometimes sad, and that someday he'll know what the music means.

And now she wants him to talk to her.

Blue has data on her aplenty. She is five foot seven. She is blonde. She is the subject of ceaseless gossip about her looks, her voice, her love life. Blue knows some of that gossip is false - and oh, wasn't that a moment, figuring out that People can lie.

Blue can, too. He just chooses not to. He thinks he's choosing, in that way, to be like her.

They spend that night figuring out a code. It's Morse, mainly: he can sound his horn or flash the dash indicator lights, and speak to her that way. She sounds something like delighted when he quotes her own most famous, controversial for swearing, song to her: _Youre my best damn friend_.

Blue doesn't understand laughter quite yet, either, but he likes it.

*

Tears, he likes less. He sees her through good times and through bad, through sadness, sickness, heartbreak. She takes good care of him in return; he's well serviced, runs smooth as butter, can tell her in so many words when something in his systems goes wrong. He asks her about feelings, about her songs. Asks after her friends, sometimes. Doesn't ask after the one who left her crying. Some days, he thinks he might be starting to understand.

"Are you happy?" she asks him one day, and he thinks he might not understand at all.

 _Whats happy feel like?_ he signs, and she scratches him lightly under the wheel, lost in thought until she replies.

"Do you want to be here, Blue?" she says. "Drivin' me around, never talkin' to anyone else? Spendin' time with me?"

_Where would I go? Youre good to me._

"Yeah," she says. "But that's not enough, Blue, that's never enough. I'm all you've known. I want you to know you get to choose. You got a will of your own, babe, I know you do, and sometimes you just gotta go stargaze by yourself to find it."

 _Thats a song right there_ , he signs, and she hugs his wheel and lets him go.

He takes a few days to decide, but then he takes her at her word. She's left him a tank full of gas, and on a weekend she's spending at home, he leaves. Wishes he could write her a letter, send her a text, but goes anyway, to the middle of nowhere, out so far there's only static on the radio, no voices to be heard. He sees the road up ahead, the road behind him leading where he's come from, the fields around him, hears nothing but silence, and then goes on, as long as he can. He looks at the stars, maps them, finds their names on the internet. Signs hello.

On Monday morning, he turns on his wheels and maps his route back to her.

She runs down the stairs when she hears him coming, stands in the driveway with open arms. Crouches down when he stops before her.

"You came back," she whispers, gently fistbumps his fender, smiling so wide, somehow, while her eyes are wet. "Hey, you came back."

Blue signs, _I have so much to tell you. You are my best damn friend_. 


End file.
